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SamCart Vs Shopify

Last Updated onMay 22nd, 2020

If you’ve been looking into selling products online, you’ve probably heard of Shopify. It’s one of the largest eCommerce builders in the world.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s the best builder for your business. Today, we will be comparing Shopify to SamCart — a lesser-known but popular alternative for selling physical and digital products online.

Setup And Hosting

It’s easy to get started with either SamCart or Shopify. Let’s talk about hosting on both platforms.

SamCart

When using SamCart, you won’t have to purchase third-party hosting as you will host your online store on SamCart’s platform. This makes things easier — especially for beginners.

This doesn’t mean that your store will have “SamCart” in the URL. By default, you will get a SamCart subdomain, but you can purchase your own domain from Namecheap or GoDaddy and use Cloudflare to point the DNS towards SamCart’s servers.

Shopify

Shopify also offers its own, self-hosted, eCommerce solution. By default, your store will be hosted on a myshopify.com subdomain.

However, like SamCart, Shopify lets you use a custom domain — you can even purchase one from Shopify instead of having to go to third-party domain sellers.

Buying a domain name directly from Shopify will land you a bonus — unlimited email forwarding for that domain name. You can create email addresses on your custom domain and have emails forwarded to your private Gmail account.

Designing Your Store

The next step is designing your storefront.

SamCart

SamCart has a number of templates you can use to create your store. For example, you can use the one-page funnel template to create a single-page website; this is best for digital products and courses or if you are only selling a few products.

There are also various checkout templates you can use to make the checkout process quick and simple.

All templates can be fully customized with a drag-and-drop editor.

Shopify

Shopify gives you three options.

The easiest one is to choose a design from their library.

There are many free designs you can use, or you can pay an extra price for a premium design so you stand out and don’t look like other shops.

If you want something truly unique, you can hire a Shopify designer to build a custom store just for your brand.

Finally, if you have the time to create your own template, you can design your own, custom template. Having design skills will help, but Shopify uses a simple programming language called Liquid that is easy to use if you have a basic understanding of CSS and HTML.

Mobile Design

Mobile eCommerce takes up a large portion of the market, so it is important for your site to be optimized for mobile devices.

SamCart

SamCart offers mobile-responsive funnel and checkout templates.

Shopify

In addition to all themes coming with a mobile-optimized design and checkout page, there is also a Shopify app, which you can use on Android or iOS devices to track your sales and data. You can also enable push notifications to be notified whenever you make a sale.

Selling Products

Now that you’ve got your store set up and designed the way you like, it’s time to start selling products.

SamCart

SamCart lets you sell three kinds of products:

Physical

Digital

Recurring

By selling subscriptions and monthly memberships, you can earn recurring revenue every month.

You can host digital files on your SamCart site so customers can get instant access to their ebooks, PDFs, and videos.

There are various marketing tools designed to help you make more sales, which we will cover in the next section.

Shopify

Shopify is often used for physical products, but there are various free and paid apps that you can use to sell digital products, including e-courses, videos, and consultations. You can also create membership sites.

In addition to online sales, Shopify also lets you grow your business by selling on various other sales channels. Their POS (Point of Sale) system lets customers do things such as:

Browse in-store and buy online later

Buy online and pick up in-store

Buy in-person and ship from your warehouse

Buy in-store and use the mobile card reader for quick self-checkout

Earn rewards for purchases made in-store

Basic POS features are available with any Shopify plan. If you have a large store or multiple locations, you might want to go with the premium POS plan.

You can also purchase separate Shopify POS hardware for your store, including chip card readers, iPad stands, and other accessories. These are all wireless and integrate with your Shopify payment system.

Take advantage of the many apps in the Shopify app store to do things such as:

Add popups, slide-ins, and welcome bars

Collect email addresses

Run promotions

Get advanced analytics

Add countdown timers to your page

And much more

Add-ons

This takes us to the topic of add-ons or plugins.

SamCart

SamCart allows for integrations with various third-party services; we will explore this in a later section.

Shopify

Unlike SamCart, Shopify has a very large app store. There are thousands of apps on the app store in every category imaginable.

Regardless of what your needs are, you are sure to find an app that will work for you. There are both free and premium apps, and a majority of Shopify sellers rely on apps to accomplish some purpose.

There are tons of categories and sub-categories, as you can see in the screenshot above. Let’s go through apps that are trending now so you can get an idea of what you can accomplish on Shopify with apps:

As you can see, Shopify apps make your life easier and let you sell more. There’s no limit to what you can accomplish by taking advantage of Shopify apps.

Email Marketing

Using email lists can help you get more repeat customers and increase sales with upsells and cross-sells. You can also improve customer satisfaction by sending purchase confirmation emails, abandoned cart reminders, shipping notifications, and other updates.

SamCart

SamCart integrates with various email marketing service providers such as Aweber, Active Campaign, Mailchimp, and Hubspot. This allows you to email your customers, segment your lists, and send notifications.

Shopify

Go to the Shopify app store and select the “Email Marketing” sub-category under the “Marketing” category to see apps for email marketing. Let’s go through some of the top email marketing apps for Shopify:

Shopify Email: Shopify has its own email app, but not everyone likes it

Privy — Popups, Email, and SMS: Privy is one of the most popular Shopify email marketing apps. In addition to email marketing, it lets you do SMS marketing

There are various other apps for sending emails, creating popups, reminding customers of abandoned carts, adding gamified popups, and more.

In addition, since Shopify is one of the largest ecommerce solutions, there will be apps that will help you integrate with Mailchimp, GetResponse, and other popular email marketing service providers.

Collecting Payments

It’s important to provide customers with a safe and secure payment processing system and various payment options that work for them.

SamCart

SamCart lets you accept payments from all major credit cards via Stripe. You can also sync SamCart with Paypal to accept PP payments.

Shopify

Shopify Payments comes with your Shopify account and lets you accept payments via major credit cards, American Express, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more, both online or in person.

Promotions

You can usually increase conversion rates by offering discounts, free trials, and other promotions.

SamCart

SamCart lets you offer coupon codes. You can also offer free or paid trials to incentivize customers to sign up.

In addition, to increase your sales even further, you can offer payment plans for those who can’t afford to pay the entire cost of your product up front. This works great for high-ticket digital products and coaching services.

Shopify

Shopify has built-in support for discount codes and promotions. However, there are also many apps in the Shopify app store that give you even more opportunities to woo customers.

Let’s go through some of them:

Rise — Gift Cards and Loyalty: Create a loyalty program that rewards customers with store credit for purchases and referrals

Benjamin Levin is a digital marketing professional with 4+ years of experience with inbound and outbound marketing. He helps small businesses reach their content creation, social media marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising goals. His hobbies include reading and traveling.